DIANE C. MCPHAIL: FOLLOW THE STARS HOME
Schedule
Sat Oct 19 2024 at 02:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
387 Perkins Ext, Memphis, TN, United States, Tennessee 38117 | Memphis, TN
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Join us as we welcome DIANE MCPHAIL on SATURDAY, OCTOBER 19 at 2:00 PM to celebrate the release of her new novel FOLLOW THE STARS HOMEABOUT THE BOOK:
“If Mark Twain were a woman this is the story he would have penned.” – Kim McGee, Lake Travis Community Library (Austin, TX)
In 1811, as the Great Comet blazed overhead, a young mom most people have never heard of braved treacherous waters, violent earthquakes, societal strictures, and hostile attacks to chart the course for westward expansion and redefine a newly formed America in incalculable ways. She would do much of it while 8 months pregnant and all with a toddler in tow. If it weren’t true, the story of Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt’s defiant journey on the first steamship to conquer the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers would be impossible to believe. Now it is brought vividly to life in the transporting new biographical novel by the acclaimed author of The Seamstress of New Orleans. Born in Jackson, MS and raised just miles from the Mississippi River, Diane C. McPhail brings her intimate understanding of its history and power to FOLLOW THE STARS HOME.
It’s a journey that most deem an insane impossibility. Yet on October 20th, 1811, Lydia Latrobe Roosevelt— daughter of one of the architects of the United States Capitol—fearlessly boards the steamship New Orleans in Pittsburgh. Eight months pregnant and with a toddler in tow, Lydia is fiercely independent despite her youth. She’s also accustomed to defying convention. Against her father’s wishes, she married his much older business colleague, inventor Nicholas Roosevelt—builder of the New Orleans—and spent her honeymoon on a primitive flatboat. But the stakes for this trip are infinitely higher. If Nicholas’s untried steamboat reaches New Orleans, it will serve as a profitable packet ship between that city and Natchez, proving the power of steam as it travels up and down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Success in this venture would revolutionize travel and trade, open the west to expansion, and secure the
Roosevelts’ future. Lydia had used her own architectural training to help design the steamship’s interior and wouldn’t dream of missing its momentous maiden voyage. She believes her family should be together for this journey, that she
is ready for all the dangers ahead – growing unrest among native people, disease or injury, and the turbulent Falls of the Ohio. But there are other challenges in store, impossible to predict as Lydia boards that fall day. Challenges
which—if survived—will haunt and transform her, as surely as the journey will alter the course of a nation ...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Diane C. McPhail is an artist, minister, and acclaimed author of Follow the Stars Home, The Abolitionist’s Daughter, and The Seamstress of New Orleans, which was a finalist for the Thomas Wolf Fiction Award and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award. A graduate of Ole Miss, Duke Writers, University of Iowa Distance, and the Yale Writers' Conference, she is a member of NC Writers Network and the Historical Novel Society. She was born in Jackson, MS, raised on the Mississippi Delta only miles from the river, and now lives in Highlands, North Carolina with her husband and dog.
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Where is it happening?
387 Perkins Ext, Memphis, TN, United States, Tennessee 38117Event Location & Nearby Stays:
